by John Buntin
“How do you maintain that kind of credit?” Sen. Charles Tobey of New Hampshire asked.
Mickey cracked his first smile. “It’s getting very weak, Senator.”
The audience chuckled. By the end of the week, the investigators were gone. When a reporter asked Cohen what he thought of the experience, Mickey cracked, “All them congressional committees are a joke, a gimmick for the furtherance of a politician.” Bill Parker worried him much more.
DURING PARKER’S first month on the job, four different emissaries approached him with variations on a single proposal: appointing a gambling “czar.” Ostensibly, this person’s job would be to curb gambling, but Parker felt his interlocutors were actually more interested in organizing it. Fearing a frame-up, Parker spoke openly about these overtures at a countywide meeting of law enforcement officers later that month. He was convinced that the various attempts to snuff out Mickey Cohen suggested that the Syndicate was preparing to move into Los Angeles in force. Los Angeles, which Parker described, in language harkening back to the 1920s, as “the last white spot among the great cities of America,” risked becoming Chicago. The LAPD was determined to resist this, he told his audiences. But he warned, “I do not know how long this can be continued. There are men here ready to get their tentacles into the city and drain off large sums of money through gambling activities of various kinds.”
Parker argued that if the forces of law and order were to prevail, a counteroffensive was needed. For too long, gangsters had taken advantage of the fact that when things got “hot” in one of Los Angeles County’s forty-five-odd municipalities, they could just move to another. At a meeting of regional law enforcement officials, Parker proposed a new approach—a central intelligence bureau that pooled resources from all of the region’s law enforcement agencies and pursued gangsters wherever they attempted to hide. Representatives from the three dozen law enforcement agencies present readily agreed to participate in such an effort. But Parker’s ambitions were larger still.
“This plan goes deeper than a means of saving Los Angeles from the stigma of vice,” Parker continued. “We are protecting the American philosophy of life. It is now clear that Russia is hoping we will destroy ourselves as a nation through our own avarice, greed, and corruption in government. Hence, this program has a wider application than in the Los Angeles area alone.” Parker envisioned a national consortium of departments committed to information-sharing.
The assembled group was, according to one account of the meeting, “startled,” both by the scope of Parker’s ambitions and by his tone. In his first speeches as chief-of-police-elect, Parker had struck a hopeful—even humble—note, committing himself and his officers to the “reasonable enforcement of the law and respect for the rights and dignity of the individual—to work for the community, not rule it.” But already another side of Chief Parker was appearing—the profoundly pessimistic observer of American decline, the Spengler of City Hall.
Parker was a powerful speaker in thrall to a potent theme: the corruption of American society and the perils this posed. “We have become a great nation in a material sense,” Parker warned the Holy Name Society in a speech soon after becoming chief. “But this unparalleled success in the acquisition of worldly goods has been accompanied by a materialistic philosophy that threatens to destroy every vestige of human liberty.
“Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell as strength gave way to weakness,” continued Parker ominously. “It is possible that our failure to recognize the indispensability of Religion and Morality to our national welfare is leading us to the same fate that beset these brave civilizations of the past.”
Whether 1950s Los Angeles was Babylon or not, Bill Parker was right about one thing, though. The underworld was moving in.
Soon after Parker was appointed chief, five of the top criminals in Los Angeles County got together in a Hollywood hotel suite to “cut up the town.” The men present included Sam Rummel, Mickey Cohen’s attorney and sometime business partner; Jimmy Utley, a former Cohen rival who now concentrated on bingo and abortion; Max Kleiger, bookmaker and gambler; Robert Gans, slot machine king during the heyday of the Combination in the 1930s; and Curly Robinson, his successor in the coin machine field, another Cohen partner. For hours, they discussed how to divvy up the most lucrative rackets, as well as bookmaking, gambling, bingo, and prostitution. They also discussed tactics. Since Parker wouldn’t bend, the underworld decided to target Mayor Bowron. They decided to mount a recall initiative (the same measure that had brought Bowron to office in the first place in 1938). In a delightfully cynical twist, the grounds for the recall were none other than the supposed influence exercised by the underworld over Mayor Bowron, as exposed by the vicecapades of 1949.*
The LAPD heard it all. The hotel suite was bugged, courtesy the LAPD intelligence division.
The idea of an intelligence division wasn’t new: Chief James E. Davis had one in the 1930s; Chief Horrall had one in the 1940s. Other units such as administrative vice and the gangster squad routinely did intelligence work too, as the bugging of Mickey Cohen’s house demonstrated. But most previous intelligence work had relied heavily on wiretaps and a style of interrogation that could be summarized as “pinch-’em-and-sweat-’em.” When General Worton took over the department, he wanted something different—analysis, predictions, and actionable information of the sort that military commanders received from their intelligence outfits. In short, he wanted a policing version of the Army’s G-2 intelligence system.
Parker shared Worton’s enthusiasm for operational intelligence. During the war, one of the new chief’s most important jobs had been reorganizing and de-Nazifying the Munich police department. At the time, he had been struck by the parallels between de-Nazification and clearing the LAPD of corrupt police officers with ties to the underworld. Now that Parker was chief, he set out to realize General Worton’s vision. He expanded the unit to roughly three dozen officers and appointed his most trusted associate in the department, James Hamilton, to head its operations. Both men agreed that traditional policing techniques simply did not work against the Syndicate. In the early 1940s, Bugsy Siegel had killed with impunity—and then been killed with equal impunity by a professional gunman who escaped without leaving a trace. More recently, even the most basic questions about Mickey Cohen were not fully resolved. Consider the case of Sam Rummel. Why was he, rather than Mickey, meeting to “cut up” Los Angeles? Was he Mickey’s mouthpiece and junior partner, as most people assumed? Or was he playing a more subtle game? In Chicago, for instance, many astute observers of the Outfit believed that the real power rested not with so-called leaders such as Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana but rather with the men who stayed in the background, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, and Murray Humphreys. Might Rummel likewise be calling the shots in Los Angeles? These were the kinds of questions the intelligence division was tasked with answering.
The intelligence division didn’t just watch and analyze. According to former gangster squad member Jack O’Mara, a favorite tactic was to drive new arrivals up into Coldwater Canyon or the Hollywood Hills to “have a little heart-to-heart talk with ’em, emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland.” O’Mara had his own way of driving the lesson home: He’d “put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, ‘You want to sneeze?’ Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?”
Mickey’s men got similar treatment, judging by a story told by former LAPD officer-turned-private-eye Fred Otash. One night, soon after the shooting at Sherry’s, Otash spotted Johnny Stompanato cruising down the Sunset Strip. Otash told his partner to pull up beside him. Then he pulled their shotgun out of the gutter between the seat and the door and, when they were parallel to Stompanato, stuck the gun out the window and shouted, “Now you’ve had it, you motherfucker!”
“When Johnny saw the shotgun, he ducked, losing control of his new Cadillac,” Otash recalled later, with obvious delight. “It went over
the curb and down the hill of Sunset. He could have been killed.”
Otash wasn’t on the intelligence unit. He was far too unreliable and unruly for such a sensitive post. But this episode drew only a mild rebuke from downtown. Clearly, tough-guy tactics were part of the job.
“Our main purpose is to keep anyone from getting ‘too big,’” Hamilton told a San Francisco newspaper years later, in discussing the exploits of his intelligence squad. “When we get word that someone has ‘juice,’ that he’s trying to ‘fix things,’ and thinks he can, then we’re after him.
“We’re selfish about it—damned selfish. Because we know that that’s the kind of a guy who’s going to wreck your police department if he can. And we’re going to stop him—one way or the other.”
It would not be long before the unit got a dramatic test of its abilities.
AS KEFAUVER ATTEMPTED to untangle the Los Angeles underworld, the county grand jury was digging into the Guarantee Finance case. Connections to Mickey Cohen were everywhere. Sam Rummel was Guarantee Finance’s attorney. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s accountant, was its accountant. The company’s books included one item in particular that caught the grand jury’s attention: $108,000 for “juice”—payoff money. The fact that the LAPD had repeatedly (albeit extralegally) raided Guarantee Finance (which was located in unincorporated county territory), only to draw a written rebuke from the sheriff’s department, made it fairly clear who was on the take. So did the astonishing testimony of Undersheriff Arthur C. Jewell before the Kefauver Committee. When pressed, Undersheriff Jewell insisted that neither he nor Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz had heard the name “Guarantee Finance” until state authorities had brought it to their attention. More astonishing still was Jewell’s response to another question. The committee asked him to outline areas of illegal activities that he suspected—suspected—Mickey Cohen might be involved in. By the fall of 1950, every newspaper reader in Los Angeles could have answered this question at length. Not Undersheriff Jewell.
“Personally, I cannot, sir; that is honest and sincere,” he told committee members.
Afterward, the county grand jury decided to look more closely at the evidence tying the sheriff’s department to Guarantee Finance. The top leadership of the sheriff’s department promised to cooperate. A secret meeting was convened to discuss investigation plans. The group of attendees was a small one: the foreman of the county grand jury, a representative of the district attorney’s office, three county law enforcement officials, and two “servers” who would deliver affidavits to witnesses the grand jury planned to call. A list of targets—most of whom were represented by Rummel—was drawn up.
The very next day, the targets scattered. Someone had leaked the list.
The secret strategy meeting had been held on a Wednesday. The witnesses the county grand jury had intended to subpoena scattered the following day, on Thursday. On Sunday, an extraordinary rendezvous occurred. Sheriff’s department captain Al Guasti, vice squad commander Carl Pearson, and vice squad sergeant Lawrence Schaffer met clandestinely with Rummel. The apparent purpose of the meeting was to coordinate a strategy whereby Rummel would cooperate with the investigation in a way that protected both himself and the sheriff’s department.
Later that evening, at about 1:30 a.m., Rummel arrived back at his house in Laurel Canyon, high above what is today West Hollywood. As he walked from his floodlit garage up the steps to his Spanish colonial, a twelve-gauge shotgun roared out from behind a hedge on the property some twenty-nine feet away. The blast hit Rummel in the neck. Blood sprayed across the walk. As the getaway car screeched away—most likely up to Mulholland or over the Santa Monica Mountains into the Valley—Rummel lay on the steps, dying but not dead.
The police got there first. By the time Parker himself arrived, with Jack Donahoe, Rummel had breathed his last breath. Surprisingly, police quickly found the murder weapon—a 1910 double-barreled Remington shotgun propped in the crook of a tree. A few minutes later, Mickey Cohen arrived, wearing a pair of slacks over his pajamas. Brushing past the police cordon, he rushed in to console Rummel’s widow. Upstairs came the commotion of police setting up a command post in Rummel’s den. A police lieutenant soon appeared.
“Cohen, the chief wants you upstairs.”
“All right, I’ll be up there,” Cohen responded. But he made no move to leave the sobbing widow.
“No, he wants you up there right now,” the lieutenant persisted.
Bill Parker was the last person Mickey Cohen wanted to see. By his own accounting, he was “still hot about Parker becoming chief of police.” Now there he was, surrounded by obsequious aides rushing to and fro, sitting behind Rummel’s desk, with Jack Donahoe standing at his side. So when Parker “starts off with this bullshit,” Cohen lost it.
“Lookit, ya punk son of a bitch. As far as I’m concerned, ya should no more be chief of police than a fucking two-dollar pimp,” screamed Cohen.
Suddenly, like a vet handling an angry cat, big Jack Donahoe was holding Mickey up by his neck.
“He’s crazy!” Parker exclaimed. “Get him out of here. I don’t want to talk to him anymore.”
Mickey was hustled off. “[I]’m a son of a bitch if I didn’t have his fingermarks on my throat for six days after,” he said later.
THE NEXT DAY Chief Parker vowed he would find the killer. The new chief needed a win. The Los Angeles Times had supported his opponent; the mayor was cool to him; even the person who had done more than any other to smooth his ascent to the top—William Worton—was turning into an impediment. On the same day that Parker himself had been sworn in as chief, Bowron had named Worton to the Police Commission. Instead of the usual group of civilians who provided oversight in name only (and who in reality met once a week to hear license applications), Parker would have to answer to a board that included his former boss. This, undoubtedly, was Mayor Bowron’s point.
But solving the case wouldn’t be easy. The LAPD really had only one concrete piece of evidence—the murder weapon itself. It was extremely unusual to find a weapon at the scene of a professional hit. By leaving it, the killer was basically giving law enforcement the middle finger. But in this case, the killer’s confidence was misplaced. In an astonishing feat of police work, the LAPD managed to trace the weapon back to Riley, Kansas, to a pawnshop frequented by a tough hood who’d recently relocated to the Los Angeles area, Tony Broncato. Broncato and his partner, Tony Trombino, were a pair of freelance gunmen who’d been questioned in connection with every major shooting in Los Angeles since Bugsy Siegel’s rub-out. Unfortunately, the two Tonys had also recently turned up dead, both shot in the back of the head in a parked car just north of Sunset.
Parker suspected the Dragna crew. He and Hamilton immediately grabbed seven top suspects, including most of Dragna’s muscle, and brought them into a suite of rooms they’d reserved at the Ambassador Hotel. (Reporters had staked out police headquarters, which were then located in City Hall, and Parker didn’t want news of the interrogation to leak to the press.) For three days and nights, police officers interrogated the suspects, turning over alibis, looking for inconsistencies, bluffing, and threatening the suspects (who were denied sleep and access to their lawyers). As the interrogation progressed, Parker became increasingly confident that Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno had been the triggerman. The police even had a witness—an elderly woman who lived across the street from the crime scene. She had seen someone who fit Fratianno’s physical description step out of the backseat of the doomed men’s car immediately after the shooting. Parker was elated. There was just one problem—district attorney Ernest Roll. He felt the case against Fratianno was weak.
“The Weasel” had an alibi. A waitress at a cafe owned by another Dragna associate, Nick Licata, said he’d been in her company the entire night of the killing. Parker thought she was lying.* But when the waitress told the grand jury Roll had reluctantly convened that two detectives had paid her a visit and attempted to persuade her to retract her stateme
nt by burning her with cigarettes, Roll declined to proceed with the case. The chief was furious, but Roll was unyielding. There would be no indictment. Parker’s effort to bring Rummel’s killers to justice had failed. Worse, Parker was beginning to suspect that DA Roll did not share the new police chief’s interest in bringing the underworld to heel.
The LAPD proved more pliable.
Parker inherited a department with pressing problems. Los Angeles had added more than 400,000 residents during and after the Second World War, yet the police department numbered just under 4,200 officers. For a city fast approaching a population of two million people, this was a grossly inadequate number. If the department was to maintain order, it would have to do so through the most focused deployment of resources possible.
Parker moved quickly to make the department more efficient. His first act was to simplify the bureaucracy. Divisions such as business, public information, internal affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice were swept into a new bureau of administration. Under the organizational chart he inherited from General Worton, fourteen department and division heads reported directly to the chief. In the new structure, that number was reduced to eight. Parker also created a new division of planning and research, which turned its attention to everything from record-keeping procedures for chronic drunkards to training manuals to deployment patterns. The 1950 annual report epitomized the new spirit. Where previous annual reports had been dull, monochromatic, and light on statistics, Parker’s first report was full of color and photographs, clear in its explanation of the department’s structure, and full of relevant tables of statistics about the department’s activities and about the problems it faced.
Parker’s reorganization gave him more time to focus on his top priority—staying in office. There were three threats that particularly worried him. The first was a recall movement aimed at Mayor Bowron and financed by the underworld. The second was an effort at the state level to legalize gambling in California, which Parker feared would corrupt the citizenry and tempt politicians with irresistible pots of money. The third, more amorphous, threat came from political attacks on the department.
